CVPR 2026 Papers

Crafting prompts via Prompt Engineering that steer a model's internal representations toward specific and pre-defined outcomes can be time-consuming, often requiring multiple iterations. Hard Prompt Inversion offers a complementary workflow: start from a reference image and generate a prompt that conditions a text-to-image (T2I) model to reconstruct the reference image. Existing inversion methods either yield incoherent text, or produce prompts that are overly sensitive to downstream token edits. We propose a dLLM-based prompt inversion framework that yield prompts that are (i) more interpretable to humans, (ii) better aligned with the reference image, and (iii) designed for downstream token swap and token append operations (aka edit-friendly prompts). The method is plug-and-play, requiring no finetuning of either the T2I model or the dLLM. Experiments across three datasets show a ~10xreduction in inversion time relative to existing prompt-inversion baselines, higher interpretability scores, and significantly higher prompt editability, as measured by TIFA, GPT-V preference scoring, and controlled user studies, all while preserving high-fidelity image generation. By coupling diffusion-time sampling with token-similarity control inside a dLLM decoder, our approach extends prompt inversion beyond reconstruction to downstream token-editing tasks, enabling faster, more transferable prompts that generalize across multiple T2I models.

Retrieving rare and safety-critical driving scenarios from large-scale datasets is essential for building robust autonomous driving (AD) systems. As dataset sizes continue to grow, the key challenge shifts from collecting more data to efficiently identifying the most relevant samples. We introduce SearchAD, a large-scale rare image retrieval dataset for AD containing over 423k frames drawn from 11 established datasets. SearchAD provides high-quality manual annotations of more than 513k bounding boxes covering 90 rare categories. It specifically targets the "needle-in-a-haystack" problem of locating extremely rare classes, with some appearing fewer than 50 times across the entire dataset. Unlike existing benchmarks, which focused on instance-level retrieval, SearchAD emphasizes semantic image retrieval with a well-defined data split, enabling text-to-image and image-to-image retrieval, few-shot learning, and fine-tuning of multi-modal retrieval models. Comprehensive evaluations show that text-based methods outperform image-based ones due to stronger inherent semantic grounding. While models directly aligning spatial visual features with language achieve the best zero-shot results, and our fine-tuning baseline significantly improves performance, absolute retrieval capabilities remain unsatisfactory. With a held-out test set on a public benchmark server, SearchAD establishes the first large-scale dataset for retrieval-driven data curation and long-tail perception research in AD: https://iis-esslingen.github.io/searchad/

With the rapid growth of stereoscopic 3D devices, real-time stereoscopic conversion has become increasingly essential. However, most existing approach rely on depth estimation, forward warping, and heavy inpainting network, resulting in high computational cost and artifacts near occlusion boundaries. Diffusion-based models have also been explored, but they suffer from iterative sampling and geometric inconsistency, making them unsuitable for real-time deployment. To address these issues, we propose Bi-Warp, a simple yet effective approach that synthesizes the right view without inpainting network by leveraging warping operations. Our approach estimates backward flow, approximates the corresponding forward flow, and generates two candidate right views via bidirectional warping. A learnable mask adaptively fuses the candidates, preserving left-right geometric consistency. Building on Bi-Warp, we introduce XPaintNet, a lightweight network that achieves comparable visual quality to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining real-time performance over 100 FPS at 2K resolution.

Pretrained models have become standard in both vision and language, yet they typically do not provide reliable measures of confidence. Existing uncertainty estimation methods--such as deep ensembles and MC dropout--are often too computationally expensive to deploy in practice. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) offers a more efficient alternative, but it requires models to be trained to output evidential quantities from the start, which is rarely true for pretrained networks. To enable EDL-style uncertainty estimation in pretrained models, we propose the Evidential Transformation Network (ETN), a lightweight post-hoc module that converts a pretrained predictor into an evidential model. ETN operates in logit space: it learns a sample-dependent affine transformation of the logits and interprets the transformed outputs as parameters of a Dirichlet distribution for uncertainty estimation. We evaluate ETN on image classification and large language model question-answering benchmarks, under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. ETN consistently improves uncertainty estimation over post-hoc baselines, while preserving accuracy and adding only minimal computational overhead.

The task of capturing and rendering 3D dynamic scenes from 2D images has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, most conventional cameras are bandwidth-limited to 30-60 FPS, restricting these methods to static or slowly evolving scenes. While overcoming bandwidth limitations is difficult in general scenes, recent years have seen a flurry of computational imaging methods that yield high-speed videos using conventional cameras for specific scenarios (e.g., motion capture and particle image velocimetry). However, most of these methods require modifications to camera optics or the addition of mechanically moving components, limiting them to a single-view high-speed capture. Consequently, these cannot be readily used to capture a 3D representation of rapid scene motion. In this paper, we propose a novel method to capture and reconstruct a volumetric representation of a high-speed scene using only unaugmented low-speed cameras. Instead of modifying the hardware or optics of each individual camera, we encode high-speed scene dynamics by illuminating the scene with a rapid, sequential color sequence. This results in simultaneous multi-view capture of the scene, in which high-speed temporal information is encoded in the images' color. To construct a high-speed volumetric representation of the dynamic scene, we develop a novel dynamic Gaussian Splatting-based approach that decodes the temporal information from the images. We evaluate our approach on simulated scenes and real-world experiments using a multi-camera imaging setup, showing first-of-a-kind high-speed volumetric scene reconstructions.

Lifelong Person Re-Identification aims to adapt to new domains while preserving old knowledge. Existing methods, whether distillation-based or rehearsal-based, attempt to consolidate diverse knowledge within a fixed model architecture. However, the limited adaptability of such architectures often leads to catastrophic forgetting by overwriting previously acquired knowledge. To overcome this limitation, we propose Versatile Incremental Adaptation (VIA), a novel dynamical expansion framework for LReID, which unleashes restricted knowledge during continuous learning by large pre-trained models. Specifically, Unseen-domain person Adapter (UnA) is embedded in VIA, which employs incremental modular learning to capture the domain's specific knowledge, thereby reducing cross-domain interference and releasing task-specific capacity that is previously limited by static parameter sharing. Meanwhile, considering the substantial amount of sharing knowledge across domains in LReID, we design the Domain-aware Dispatch module to enable inter-domain collaboration and knowledge reuse through adaptive cooperation among multiple shared adapters. Besides, a Holistic Domain Controller is designed to dynamically regulate the learning capacity for new domains based on knowledge similarity, thereby effectively unleashing the generalization potential of pre-trained models. Furthermore, a lightweight Similarity-Guided Auto-Selector is proposed to assign inputs to relevant adapters during inference automatically. Extensive experiments validate VIA's effectiveness, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in both seen and unseen domains.

Diffusion transformers have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality image and video generation, but their computational overhead remains a significant challenge. Existing token reduction-based acceleration techniques, such as caching and merging, attempt to reduce this cost from both temporal and spatial perspectives, but often compromise generation quality by introducing non-updated or non-self denosing directions. In this paper, we propose Residual Caching (ResCa), a novel, training-free framework that introduces a proxy denoising perspective to overcome these limitations. ResCa achieves acceleration while maintaining a denoising trajectory that is both self and updated. The core idea is to perform true denoising on only one proxy token within each trajectory-based cluster, and use its computed multi-order residuals to guide the simulated denoising of all other tokens. ResCa can be seamlessly integrated into various diffusion models, including DiT, FLUX, and HunyuanVideo. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving up to a 5.5 times acceleration in GFLOPs while maintaining near-lossless generation quality on FLUX. Project page: https://fanghaipeng.github.io/ResCa.

Modeling spinal motion is fundamental to understanding human biomechanics, yet remains underexplored in computer vision due to the spine's complex multi-joint kinematics and the lack of large-scale 3D annotations. We present a biomechanics-aware keypoint simulation framework that augments existing human pose datasets with anatomically consistent 3D spinal keypoints derived from musculoskeletal modeling. Using this framework, we create the first open dataset, named SIMSPINE, which provides sparse vertebra-level 3D spinal annotations for natural full-body motions in indoor multi-camera capture without external restraints. With 2.14 million frames, this enables data-driven learning of vertebral kinematics from subtle posture variations and bridges the gap between musculoskeletal simulation and computer vision. In addition, we release pretrained baselines covering fine-tuned 2D detectors, monocular 3D pose lifting models, and multi-view reconstruction pipelines, establishing a unified benchmark for biomechanically valid spine motion estimation. Specifically, our 2D spine baselines improve the state-of-the-art from 0.63 to 0.80 AUC in controlled environments, and from 0.91 to 0.93 AP for in-the-wild spine tracking.Together, the simulation framework and SIMSPINE dataset advance research in vision-based biomechanics, motion analysis, and digital human modeling by enabling reproducible, anatomically grounded 3D spine estimation under natural conditions.

Accurately modelling human attention is essential for numerous computer vision applications, particularly in the domain of automotive safety. Existing methods typically collapse gaze into saliency maps or scanpaths, treating gaze dynamics only implicitly. We instead formulate gaze modelling as an autoregressive dynamical system and explicitly unroll raw gaze trajectories over time, conditioned on both gaze history and the evolving environment. Driving scenes are represented as gaze-centric graphs processed by the Affinity Relation Transformer (ART), a heterogeneous graph transformer that models interactions between driver gaze, traffic objects, and road structure. We further introduce the Object Density Network (ODN) to predict next-step gaze distributions, capturing the stochastic and object-centric nature of attentional shifts in complex environments. We also release Focus100, a new dataset of raw gaze data from 30 participants viewing egocentric driving footage. Trained directly on raw gaze, without fixation filtering, our unified approach produces more natural gaze trajectories, scanpath dynamics, and saliency maps than existing attention models, offering valuable insights for the temporal modelling of human attention in dynamic environments.

Monocular metric depth estimation (MMDE) is a core challenge in computer vision, playing a pivotal role in real-world applications that demand accurate spatial understanding. Although prior works have shown promising zero-shot performance in MMDE, they often struggle with generalization across diverse camera types, such as fisheye and 360^\circ cameras. Recent advances have addressed this through unified camera representations or canonical representation spaces, but they require either including large FoV camera data during training or separately trained models for different domains. We propose UniDAC, an MMDE framework that presents universal robustness in all domains and generalizes across diverse cameras using a single model. We achieve this by decoupling metric depth estimation into relative depth prediction and spatially varying scale estimation, enabling robust performance across different domains. We propose a lightweight Depth-Guided Scale Estimation module that upsamples a coarse scale map to high resolution using the relative depth map as guidance to account for local scale variations. Furthermore, we introduce RoPE-\phi, a distortion-aware positional embedding that respects the spatial warping in Equi-Rectangular Projections (ERP) via latitude-aware weighting. UniDAC achieves state of the art (SoTA) in cross-camera generalization by consistently outperforming prior methods across all datasets.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated strong decision-making abilities in screen-based interaction tasks. However, they remain highly vulnerable to pop-up-based environmental injection attacks, where malicious visual elements divert model attention and lead to unsafe or incorrect actions. Existing defense methods either require costly retraining or perform poorly under inductive interference. In this work, we systematically study how such attacks alter the attention behavior of GUI agents and uncover a layer-wise attention divergence pattern between correct and incorrect outputs. Based on this insight, we propose LaSM, a Layer-wise Scaling Mechanism that selectively amplifies attention and MLP modules in critical layers. LaSM improves the alignment between model saliency and task-relevant regions without additional training. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the defense success rate and exhibits strong robustness, while having negligible impact on the model's general capabilities. Our findings reveal that attention misalignment is a core vulnerability in MLLM agents and can be effectively addressed through selective layer-wise modulation.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art image and video generation performance, but sampling remains expensive due to repeated transformer forward passes over many timesteps. Feature caching offers a training-free way to accelerate inference by reusing or forecasting hidden representations, yet recent forecasting-based methods derive their coefficients from hand-crafted formulas (e.g., Taylor expansion), which ultimately reduce to fixed linear combinations of a few historical features. Such fixed coefficients are suboptimal and fragile under aggressive skipping. In this paper, we first show that existing forecasting-based caching methods can be unified in a common linear form, and then analyze DiT feature trajectories, finding that for most denoising steps the current feature can be reconstructed from past features with projection fidelity above 0.95, indicating that accurate linear prediction is feasible. Motivated by this, we propose L^2P (Learnable Linear Predictor), a simple data-driven caching framework that replaces hand-designed coefficients with learnable per-timestep weights trained on a small set of cached trajectories using a mean-squared error loss, converging in about 20 seconds on a single GPU. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art DiTs demonstrate that L^2P consistently outperforms existing caching baselines: on FLUX.1-dev, L^2P achieves a 4.55xFLOPs reduction and 4.15xlatency speedup with a PSNR of 31.459, and on Qwen-Image and Qwen-Image-Lightning, it maintains high visual fidelity even under up to 7.18xacceleration, where prior methods suffer from noticeable quality degradation. These results show that learning linear predictors is a practical and effective alternative to designing increasingly complex forecasting formulas for efficient diffusion model inference. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/Aredstone/L2P-Cache.

Large-scale maps of field boundaries are essential for agricultural monitoring tasks. Existing deep learning approaches for satellite-based field mapping are sensitive to illumination, spatial scale, and changes in geographic location. We conduct the first systematic evaluation of segmentation and geospatial foundation models (GFMs) for global field boundary delineation using the Fields of The World (FTW) benchmark. We evaluate 18 models under unified experimental settings, showing that a U-Net semantic segmentation model outperforms instance-based and GFM alternatives on a suite of performance and deployment metrics. We propose a new segmentation approach that combines a U-Net backbone, composite loss functions, and targeted data augmentations to enhance performance and robustness under real-world conditions. Our model achieves a 76% IoU and 47% object-F1 on FTW, an increase of 6% and 9% over the previous baseline. Our approach provides a practical framework for reliable, scalable, and reproducible field boundary delineation across model design, training, and inference. We release all models and model-derived field boundary datasets for five countries.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, valued for their potential to leverage world knowledge and reason about complex driving scenes. However, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: a persistent misalignment between language instructions and action outputs, and the inherent inefficiency of typical auto-regressive action generation. In this paper, we introduce LinkVLA, a novel architecture that directly addresses these challenges to enhance both alignment and efficiency. First, we establish a structural link by unifying language and action tokens into a shared discrete codebook, processed within a single multi-modal model. This structurally enforces cross-modal consistency from the ground up. Second, to create a deep semantic link, we introduce an auxiliary action understanding objective that trains the model to generate descriptive captions from trajectories, fostering a bidirectional language-action mapping. Finally, we replace the slow, step-by-step generation with a two-step coarse-to-fine generation method (C2F) that efficiently decodes the action sequence, saving 86% inference time. Experiments on closed-loop driving benchmarks show consistent gains in instruction following accuracy and driving performance, alongside reduced inference latency.

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) has advanced 3D vision, yet its global attention layers suffer from quadratic computational costs that hinder scalability. Several sparsification-based acceleration techniques have been proposed to alleviate this issue, but they often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation. We hypothesize that the accuracy degradation stems from the heterogeneity in head-wise sparsification sensitivity, as the existing methods apply a uniform sparsity pattern across all heads. Motivated by this hypothesis, we present a two-stage sparsification pipeline that effectively quantifies and exploits headwise sparsification sensitivity. In the first stage, we measure head-wise sparsification sensitivity using a novel metric, the Head Sensitivity Score (HeSS), which approximates the Hessian with respect to two distinct error terms on a small calibration set. In the inference stage, we perform HeSS-Guided Sparsification, leveraging the pre-computed HeSS to reallocate the total attention budget-assigning denser attention to sensitive heads and sparser attention to more robust ones. We demonstrate that HeSS effectively captures head-wise sparsification sensitivity and empirically confirm that attention heads in the global attention layers exhibit heterogeneous sensitivity characteristics. Extensive experiments further show that our method effectively mitigates performance degradation under high sparsity, demonstrating strong robustness across varying sparsification levels. Code is available at https://github.com/libary753/HeSS.

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) provides spatially-resolved gene expression, offering crucial insights into tissue architecture and complex diseases. However, its prohibitive cost limits widespread adoption, leading to significant attention on inferring spatial gene expression from readily available whole slide images. While graph neural networks have been proposed to model interactions between tissue regions, their reliance on pre-defined sparse graphs prevents them from considering potentially interacting spot pairs, resulting in a structural limitation in capturing complex biological relationships. To address this, we propose FEAST (Fully connected Expressive Attention for Spatial Transcriptomics), an attention-based framework that models the tissue as a fully connected graph, enabling the consideration of all pairwise interactions. To better reflect biological interactions, we introduce negative-aware attention, which models both excitatory and inhibitory interactions, capturing essential negative relationships that standard attention often overlooks. Furthermore, to mitigate the information loss from truncated or ignored context in standard spot image extraction, we introduce an off-grid sampling strategy that gathers additional images from intermediate regions, allowing the model to capture a richer morphological context. Experiments on public ST datasets show that FEAST surpasses state-of-the-art methods in gene expression prediction while providing biologically plausible attention maps that clarify positive and negative interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/starforTJ/ FEAST.

Learning joint representations across multiple modalities remains a central challenge in multimodal machine learning. Prevailing approaches predominantly operate in pairwise settings, aligning two modalities at a time. While some recent methods aim to capture higher-order interactions among multiple modalities, they often overlook or insufficiently preserve pairwise relationships, limiting their effectiveness on single-modality tasks. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Fusion (ConFu), a framework that jointly embeds both individual modalities and their fused combinations into a unified representation space, where modalities and their fused counterparts are aligned. ConFu extends traditional pairwise contrastive objectives with an additional fused-modality contrastive term, encouraging the joint embedding of modality pairs with a third modality. This formulation enables ConFu to capture higher-order dependencies, such as XOR-like relationships, that cannot be recovered through pairwise alignment alone, while still maintaining strong pairwise correspondence. We evaluate ConFu on synthetic and real-world multimodal benchmarks, assessing its ability to exploit cross-modal complementarity, capture higher-order dependencies, and scale with increasing multimodal complexity. Across these settings, ConFu demonstrates competitive performance on retrieval and classification tasks, while supporting unified one-to-one and two-to-one retrieval within a single contrastive framework. We release our code and dataset at https://github.com/estafons/confu.

Accident anticipation aims to predict impending collisions from dashcam videos and trigger early alerts. Existing methods rely on binary supervision with manually annotated "anomaly onset" frames, which are subjective and inconsistent, leading to inaccurate risk estimation. In contrast, we propose RiskProp, a novel collision-anchored self-supervised risk propagation paradigm for early accident anticipation, which removes the need for anomaly onset annotations and leverages only the reliably annotated collision frame. RiskProp models temporal risk evolution through two observation-driven losses. First, since future frames contain more definitive evidence of an impending accident, we introduce a future-frame regularization loss that uses the model's next-frame prediction as a soft target to supervise the current frame, enabling backward propagation of risk signals. Second, inspired by the empirical trend of rising risk before accidents, we design an adaptive monotonic constraint to encourage a non-decreasing progression over time. Experiments on CAP-DATA and Nexar demonstrate that RiskProp achieves state-of-the-art performance and produces smoother, more discriminative risk curves, improving both early anticipation and interpretability.

Parking is a critical task for autonomous driving systems (ADS), with unique challenges in crowded parking slots and GPS-denied environments. However, existing works focus on 2D parking slot perception, mapping, and localization, 3D reconstruction remains underexplored, which is crucial for capturing complex spatial geometry in parking scenarios. Naively improving the visual quality of reconstructed parking scenes does not directly benefit autonomous parking, as the key entry point for parking is the slots perception module. To address these limitations, we curate the first benchmark named ParkRecon3D, specifically designed for parking scene reconstruction. It includes sensor data from four surround-view fisheye cameras with calibrated extrinsics and dense parking slot annotations. We then propose ParkGaussian, the first framework that integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for parking scene reconstruction. To further improve the alignment between reconstruction and downstream parking slot detection, we introduce a slot-aware reconstruction strategy that leverages existing parking perception methods to enhance the synthesis quality of slot regions. Experiments on ParkRecon3D demonstrate that ParkGaussian achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and better preserves perception consistency for downstream tasks. The code and dataset will be released.